The Storm of the Century

by Al Roker

  There was only one conclusion. The men in Washington finally drew it. The storm that had left Cuba on Wednesday must, after all, still be somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico.

  But where?

  Also: it must not be heading northeast. It must heading northwest.

  Who is right? Father Gangoite had asked. His question was rhetorical, since Gangoite knew that he and his fellow Cuban forecaster Jover were right, and that Stockman, Dunwoody, and Moore were wrong.

  On Friday morning, it began to become obvious to the U.S. Weather Bureau too that, regarding the direction and the placement of that storm, the Cubans were right.

  And yet on one point, Director Willis Moore remained insistent.

  The Cubans were correct about the storm’s direction. He could accept that.

  But the Cubans couldn’t be right about this being a hurricane.

  If the storm was really traveling from Cuba to Texas, it couldn’t be a hurricane, Moore knew. Because hurricanes can’t do that.

  So this thing heading across the gulf, “slowly northwest,” as one of Moore’s cables finally admitted on Friday to his Gulf Coast weather stations, was only a modest storm system, he was sure. There would be high winds along the Texas coast on Friday night and on Saturday. Hard rain was probable too.

  Then in Galveston things got stranger still.

  That Friday afternoon, a heavy swell formed just off Galveston’s long gulf beach. The swell was coming from the southeast. And it arrived with an ominous roar.

  Yet there was nothing about the sky to go with this. None of the brick-dust reddishness of mist that had often presaged hurricanes before. There was nothing unusual about the clouds.

  No red sky at morning? Then no real reason for warning. The barometer was indeed falling—but only very slowly. A storm was clearly coming from the southeast, as storms had come before. So the correction to the Weather Bureau forecast made sense after all. The clouds, meanwhile, were coming from the northeast.

  So a severe storm, probably. The ominous roar of the swells confirmed it. There was nothing in the air, or on the instruments, to suggest anything more seriously amiss.

  In fact, to the ordinary citizens of Galveston, untutored in the signs of storms, the warning flag flying from the Levy Building might have seemed preposterous. The heat seemed to be about to break. The heavens were blue, with pretty clouds lying along the horizon of the gigantic light-filled firmament that is the gulf sky.

  If those clouds meant rain, good. A cooling trend would no doubt follow.

  And those swells off the beach, multiplying now and rolling in, caused actual surf. To those living near the flat gulf, surf was something unusual. Surf was something fun. Friday became a nice day for a trip down to the gaudy pavilions at the bathing pier. Maybe take a trolley ride on the track that ran along the beach over the water.

  Crowds began to gather on the beach. Bathers started having a good time with waves that came from somewhere a long way out and rolled high up on the beach. Soon those waves were jumping high enough to nearly touch the pier’s electric lamps that stood tall above the water.

  Few in Galveston had seen anything like that before. There had been storms, but this looked to be turning into an exciting one. On foot, on bicycles, and by carriage and wagon, people kept coming down to the beach.

  The surf was fun, but a swell is a special kind of wave, and it portended no good for Galveston. Coming from somewhere far away, swells are caused by winds you can’t feel directly, because they are blowing far from where you are. And they’re blowing hard.

  Local winds do, of course, cause waves. At ocean beaches, which normally have some surf in any weather, a nearby gust can lift surf into crashing breakers. On a gulf, bay, or sound beach, usually quieter, unusually hard local winds can create ocean-like surf. Even a wind blowing across a puddle of rain will lift the puddle’s surface in ripples; winds blowing across lakes make big waves.

  But a swell is a wave that has been lifted by a hard wind far out to sea. This wave has then traveled a long distance, arriving on a beach that may be having relatively calm winds. For swells to appear one after another on a beach, a far-distant wind must have been blowing very hard for a long time across a large expanse of water, creating long waves.

  Unimpeded—as in the Gulf of Mexico—such waves can travel astonishingly long distances. Under the right conditions, a wave generated on one side of the world can organize itself during its long trip, minimize the kind of chop that sometimes breaks up big waves, and arrive days later, intact, on a beach on the other side of the world.

  And as swells continue to be generated, many miles from the beach where they arrive, one will follow another toward that beach. The greater the distance they must cover, the greater their separation. Swells appear on the beach in succession, with pauses—sometimes very long ones—between them.

  If you’re standing on the beach, and if you’re able to tune out a multitude of distractions—chop, normal wave patterns, excited beachgoers—and note the time that elapses between the swells’ arrival, you can estimate your distance from whatever storm is generating them. And as those timings change, you can estimate the rate at which that storm is moving toward you.

  Isaac Cline hadn’t yet started timing the swells bringing high crashing surf to Galveston’s gulf beach. Cline and his assistants were busy all day. Even in advance of what they still believed would be nothing more than a severe storm, there was much for the weathermen to do. Detailed information had to be given out and constantly updated. Bathers and holiday-makers might delight in the thrill of the rising surf, but ship captains and businesspeople and cotton investors needed real information. It was up to the weathermen to get it to them.

  So because they’d raised the storm-warning flag, and thanks as well to the crashing surf on the beach, Isaac and Joseph Cline had to communicate not only with the newspaper and the Cotton Exchange but also, by telephone and in person, with captains and the harbormaster and other concerned citizens, official and civilian alike. By Friday afternoon, the office on the third floor of the Levy Building had become a scene of constantly ringing phones and people crowding in to get their questions answered.

  Joseph was overseeing most of the calls and other conversation. Isaac spent time on the roof, taking readings.

  Then, as the afternoon waned, Joseph put John Blagden in charge of the phones and the people jamming the office. Joseph too climbed to the roof. Isaac went home, and Joseph relieved him.

  Meanwhile the clouds had thickened. The day that had started clear was now cloudy. From out in the gulf, the swells kept coming.

  Annie McCullough had recently bought a new pair of shoes. They weren’t quite right, though, and that Friday she’d sent her husband Ed to the store to exchange them.

  Living level with the beach, really almost on it, Annie could easily see and marvel at the huge breakers rising. She watched the people leaping about in the unaccustomed surf. She was thinking about the coming storm, about what it might do to the roses she grew in her side yard.

  A neighbor rushed by. She called to Annie that she was heading down to the beach to have some fun.

  But Annie didn’t want to frolic. If the storm came, those roses might get battered.

  Soon Ed returned from the shoe store, and Annie got Ed’s thirteen-year-old cousin Henry, who lived with them, to dig up the roses. He put them, with their rootballs, in a big tub of soil for safekeeping.

  The red-haired young schoolteacher stood where the street ended at the gulf beach. It was late Friday afternoon, and Daisy looked out over the expanse of sand and water. She watched each huge wave rise, then tower and fall, pounding the sand. Between long pauses, she heard the roar of the swells.

  She saw clouds everywhere in the great gulf sky. They had grown so thick that they obscured the sunset.

  Daisy decided that this Friday evening would not be an ideal evening for her usual daily swim. It had been a nice morning. It wasn’t a pleasant evening.
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  Before turning for home, though, she watched a moment longer. The gigantic waves, as they rose and crashed, looked dull brownish—full of sand. The bathers drawn earlier by the novelty of surf in the gulf had all gone home. Nobody was in the water now, only a few observers like her, standing here and there about the beach. Watching the waves.

  So Daisy went home to the apartment where she lived with her mother, aunt, brother, and sister, in the Lucas Terrace building, at the far east end of Broadway, near the beach.

  Because it was a normal Friday evening, Rabbi Henry Cohen would have been leading services at Galveston’s Congregation B’nai Israel and planning the next day’s Shabbat services. But Rabbi Cohen’s services were something special—as was the man himself.

  Cohen had begun making some radical changes in traditional practice. Back in Woodville, Mississippi, where he’d served before coming to Galveston, he’d noticed a problem that was disadvantaging the Jewish farmers. On Saturdays, farmers would cart their produce into town, set up stalls, and sell. Observant Jewish farmers, though, couldn’t open their stands until after Shabbat services were over. All morning, they could not compete.

  So Cohen began ending services early, unleashing Jewish farmers into the market fray. People took notice, but instead of sparking conflict, Cohen’s decision made him new friends. Public speaking was the major form of popular entertainment; people liked all kinds of lectures, sermons, and recitations. When Gentile farmers got word that the rabbi was preaching a powerful sermon on Saturday mornings in Woodville, they started showing up at the synagogue to listen. So popular did Cohen’s services become with all of the farmers that the market stayed closed on Saturday mornings until Shabbat services ended.

  Rabbi Cohen had continued his unusually ecumenical practices here in Galveston. He became fast friends with Father James Kirwin, the Roman Catholic rector of Galveston’s splendid, gigantic St. Mary’s Cathedral. The rabbi was known and respected throughout the city, and he was seen everywhere, scooting about on his bicycle with a long list of good works to perform for people of every race, creed, and color. He was an odd duck—an Englishman, for one thing, with a slight stammer—and yet both his preaching and his endlessly energetic charity made Henry Cohen one of the favorites in town.

  He read ten languages. He was a published Talmudic scholar and historian of Texas. After studying at Jews’ Hospital and Jews’ College in London, he’d lived in Cape Town, South Africa, and served as a rabbi in Kingston, Jamaica. He became the Woodville, Mississippi, rabbi when he was only twenty-two, and Galveston’s B’nai Israel rabbi when he was twenty-five. With his wife, Mollie, he had two children.

  This English rabbi had visions for Galveston, and for Texas in general. One of them was to make Texas a major port of entry for immigrants: not only Jews but Catholics as well. The big wave of immigration from eastern and southern Europe had begun after the Civil War. Cohen wanted to help integrate the new Jewish immigrants who spoke Yiddish with the established German Jews of Texas. The northeastern port cities were teeming. Cohen wanted Jews and other immigrants to settle in the country’s midsection and West, from Texas and New Orleans to the Rockies.

  Around town, the rabbi’s personal efforts were legendary. As he buzzed around on his bicycle, long coattails flapping behind him, he consulted his cuffs, where he kept his list of appointments. Like all of his fellow Galvestonians, he had plans.

  Friday evening, Ed Ketchum, Galveston’s genial, Yankee-transplant chief of police, was having supper at home with his family. Ketchum’s job naturally made him more alert than other Galvestonians to changes in the weather that might affect public safety. All week, as he’d been catching up with paperwork after his trip to Chicago, the chief had been keeping an ear open to Isaac Cline’s reports.

  Earlier that week he’d received word, he now told his family over supper, of a bad storm over Cuba. And that storm had been moving north.

  Also, earlier today, the Galveston weather station had reported rising wind. But those gusts were really pretty light, Ed assured his family, and the coming storm probably wouldn’t amount to much.

  All day, the Cline brothers had been fending off confusion and worry. Their feelings were based on the suddenness of the change, the reporting from Washington, and the direction of the storm. Now, Friday night, on the roof of the Levy Building, Joseph Cline began succumbing to a sense of impending disaster.

  New Orleans was the nearest weather station to the center of the storm. The reports Joseph was now receiving had it that the storm was southwest of New Orleans and moving westward.

  Joseph knew what that meant. The storm was heading straight for Galveston Island and the Texas Gulf Coast.

  He didn’t panic. He did his job. Down in the office, he quickly created a new weather map based on the reports he was receiving by cable. He left the building and took the map to the post office. He deposited it there to await the first train over the railroad bridge to the Texas mainland.

  That was about midnight. Out of those thickening clouds, rain had started falling steadily. Fretful, Joseph went to Isaac’s house, where he too lived, at Twenty-Fifth and Q, near the gulf beach. In his room, Joseph tried to sleep.

  And he did sleep—but restlessly. Visions of hurricanes kept invading his dreams.

  At 4:00 A.M. he awakened with a start. He had a sudden, clear impression that gulf water had flowed all the way into the Clines’ yard.

  Joseph got up. From a south window, he peered down at the yard.

  It wasn’t a dream. The yard really was underwater. The gulf was in town. Joseph went to awaken Isaac.

  The secretary of the Galveston Cotton Exchange, Dr. Samuel Young, was an amateur meteorologist, and he lived near the beach too, only a block north of the Cline home. Sometimes during nighttime thunderstorms, from his upper porch Young could see Isaac Cline out on his own upper porch, observing the weather.

  This Friday evening, Young had walked over to the beach to observe the unusual conditions of the waves, passing the Clines’ on his way. Despite the normal storm-warning flag, Young had an idea that something worse was coming.

  His concern was based on a visit he’d made to the Weather Bureau office in the Levy Building earlier that week, both as an official of the Cotton Exchange and as a meteorology enthusiast. Young had long wanted to see for himself how the mapmaker there drew the maps that his office received every day from the bureau’s weather station in Galveston. The mapmaker used a system of colored chalk on a blackboard. To those in the know, every detail could be gathered for much of the country: tiny circles, letters, arrows, and dotted lines indicating rain, wind, air pressure, temperature, clouds, clear skies.

  Young watched closely that morning when the mapmaker drew the symbols for the storm that had been observed at Key West. Young thought conditions there indicated the presence of a serious tropical storm—a cyclonic structure formed around a discernible eye, growing in strength somewhere south of Florida. Tropical storms like that can quickly turn into hurricanes.

  The mapmaker, though, said he’d heard nothing from Washington about anything like that. Anyway, there was no chalk symbol for such a storm.

  All week, Young had gone on thinking about it. All week, he’d thought the tide was unusually high, given that the wind wasn’t behind it.

  So as he stood on the beach Friday night, he was developing a theory. When he looked southward at the surf, he could feel the wind at his back. A north wind like that should be flattening the gulf, pushing the tide back. Yet the surf kept rising to crashing heights he’d never seen before. On that basis, and despite the bureau’s refusal to call this storm what it was, Young concluded on his own that this thing approaching the Gulf Coast was a hurricane.

  His wife and children were on a train, coming home to Texas from a summer in the West. Because hurricanes on northwest paths always, the science had it, recurve eastward. Young concluded that its center was likely to hit not Galveston but Mississippi. He left the wild beachfron
t and went home to bed.

  At 4:00 on Saturday morning at the Cline home, Isaac’s wife, Cora, and the three little girls slumbered on. Cora was pregnant again.

  But the brothers were wide awake. The worst had begun, Joseph told Isaac. Their yard was underwater. Joseph was sure that what was coming was a disastrous hurricane.

  CHAPTER 8

  SATURDAY MORNING: STORM TIDE

  ISAAC CLINE REMAINED AS METHODICAL AS EVER.

  The station had a regularly scheduled 7:00 A.M. report to make to Washington. Conferring quietly with Joseph in the early hours of Saturday morning, Isaac decided that before sending that report, the brothers must be sure to assemble all data, both from weather-station instrument readings and from their own observations of conditions. They must then cable updates to Washington every two hours as matters in Galveston developed. He sent Joseph back to the Levy Building to take readings.

  By 5:00 A.M. Isaac himself had harnessed his horse to a two-wheel hunting wagon. That would keep him from having to wade through water that was already covering the beaches.

  He drove the few blocks to the gulf side. Then he turned east and drove all the way out to the east end, not far from where Daisy Thorne lived with her family at the Lucas Terrace Apartments.

  There the beach was wide, and the water had farther to come before it reached the streets. Looking out over the expanse of sand, Cline now began timing the swells.

  They came every one to five minutes. They were increasing in force and frequency. Even here, on the broad east beach, the water was moving steadily up the sand toward the street.

  Sometimes he sat in his horse-drawn wagon in the rain. At other times he paced on the beach. Always he kept looking at the water flowing from the gulf toward the streets.

  And now Isaac Cline made another observation.